Zen Bender

by Stephanie Krikorian

  One night while waiting for Doug (and drooling over Tommy), I mulled over the horror show that had become my day job and how I could build a business on my own and control my own destiny, rather than wait for someone in some office somewhere to crunch some numbers and lay me off again. Plus, I had been watching the show House of Lies, about a consulting firm, so while I didn’t have an MBA to guide me as I attempted to run a business, I felt I had learned a lot about billing and such, though in a less ruthless and racy manner than theirs.

  Regardless of my inexperience or ability to break free, it was officially, glaringly apparent that my job was not for me, and if I had any potential, I was never going to realize it or live up to it there. So that night, at my wannabe local-local, I found myself staring at a row of grappa bottles up on the wall. I don’t even like grappa, but the bottles were fascinating to look at. And there were tons of them—twenty or so—all beautiful odd and varied shapes, glass-and-clear-liquid art. I was mesmerized by how pretty they were, wondering how many varieties of grappa there could be and whether they all tasted the same amount of gross. As I pondered them, I had a strange and unfamiliar feeling of confidence wash over me.

  Lost in thought, I metaphorically stumbled across a message in the bottle. Well, one in the form of a wall of grappa.

  It read: Bet on you.

  Bet on you.

  The Universe was speaking. Or was it my long-lost confidence?

  Either way, it was strangely loud, and it formulated rather quickly in my brain. Was I going to continue to work at what felt like a dead-end job? Was the anxiety of living on high alert, wondering when the hammer would next come down on my fate at the hands of another human resources person, worth it? We hadn’t come out of the recession fully. Jobs and projects were still going away. Things did not feel secure.

  Betting on myself meant taking my fate into my own hands. Jump, and all the stuff on my new and improved vision board would form.

  Would it, though?

  Writing other people’s books had potential, but it was uncertain. But my job was, too. Somewhere in my logic, I considered that, if a single woman with only one mouth to feed couldn’t do it, who could? Strangely, at a time when my confidence tank was depleted and fueling me with only fumes, I had the conviction buried somewhere inside to quit and start my own business.

  Sitting by and letting someone else drive was, apparently, not my thing. Reflecting on the machine inside me that turned on when I needed to find a job, I realized that I was a survivor. I was never going down with the ship. If I had learned one thing about myself, that was it.

  When I was deep in it, sadly, my job loss seemed like a weakness, and my inability to find a job an indication of my shortcomings. It was only later that I realized all of that was just what was inside my head. Certainly, those thoughts wouldn’t have crossed my mind when witnessing anybody else struggling to find a job.

  But, hey, not many of us offer ourselves the same level of dignity and respect we give to others. (I later read that in a self-help book.)

  Friends later commented on how impressed they were that I’d tackled that job search like I had, and in a way that they said they would never have been able to. Thinking about those comments, in that moment—both the insanity of it all and the motivation—I decided that I had the strength to cut my losses, and my 401k (gulp), and jump ship to go it alone.

  Maybe ego was involved to a certain degree. Maybe I wanted to leave on my own terms. Maybe I could not face being shown the door. Choice is, after all, choice. Maybe being laid off a second time, which was entirely possible, was not how I wanted my story to go. So I rewrote it.

  There I was, just two years after a herculean effort to find a job, and I was quitting one. Bold move? Yes. Brave or stupid? Hard to say. Probably both. But once the decision was made, and my parents hesitantly got on board (at least they said they were, but only after telling me that Uncle Burt said it was nearly impossible to make a living as a writer), I did it. Considering the agony of the previous two years and the number of people I knew who had lost work and never quite landed it again, it was a perplexing and audacious move, and I’m sure, to many who had watched me buckle under the pressure of the job search, completely idiotic. But it suddenly felt right—like, the rightest thing. I felt oddly calm in a way I had not previously.

  At the very least, I would be in charge of my destiny. No boss or corporation would be the decider in my career. Stephanie, Inc. would call the shots and, as such, I felt confident I would survive. I had learned that much. I was taking my professional destiny into my own hands. As crazy as it was, I knew in my gut it was the right move.

  Plus, I had that million-dollar check pinned to my wall, so I was probably going to be good.

  Self-Help: Occupational Hazard or Personality Disorder?

  Jumping off a cliff and starting my own business writing self-help books for well-known experts meant that it wasn’t just the vision board that got me hooked on finding the fix to all the holes that surely must have existed in my mind, body, and soul. Being obsessed with personal growth and self-help, in fairness, suddenly became my full-time job.

  Writing a book for someone is actually writing a book with them. Twenty or more hours of their time is required just to get started—mostly with interviews and talking through their life or their life’s work. It’s intimate in a sense, because they have to open up and trust me with their life story or body of work, their insecurities, and the stories they aren’t certain they want to share.

  It gets personal.

  An interviewer by trade, I love asking questions. I pride myself on pulling stuff out of them that maybe they didn’t think was important. I often try to make idle chit-chat about seemingly unimportant things, or talk a bit about myself, to spark a conversation unrelated to the specifics of their book. That’s when I can hear how a person talks, their voice, and usually learn more about them than I do when they focus on the topic at hand. In those instances, sometimes, the best stuff comes out—the stuff they wouldn’t have thought important. Sometimes it’s challenging to figure out how to best demonstrate a protocol they may advise in their book, to get it on the page in a way that the masses may best understand. Talking things through helps.

  Generally, whenever someone meets with me to write a book, they will tell me the concept of their book in relation to a previous bestseller. The Marie Kondo of love or the Suze Orman of career coaches; the #GirlBoss of whatever or the Phil Knight of blah-blah. In fairness, there is something to be said for banking on previous winners; we see it in movies all the time.

  For me, that means a lot of reading and research before I embark on someone’s diet book or career book. If an expert I’m working with offered up a diet plan, I’d do it, measuring food, eating at certain times, and analyzing how I felt along the way. I try to understand how it made me feel, whether something was confusing or simple, so I could best explain it to the reader.

  One book I worked on asked the reader to make some consumption adjustments, but also to do some tests, including sending in a hair sample to check for heavy metal toxicity in their body. I figured I would try it to really get to the heart of the book and figure out what the author was trying to accomplish. I clipped a small chunk of hair and sent it to California. A note came back saying I hadn’t cut the hair properly, hadn’t supplied enough; I had done it wrong. So, I cut another larger chunk from the back of my head and sent that in. The results came back, and some numbers were high according to the chart and some were low, but honestly, I didn’t have a clue what they meant or how to interpret them, so I did nothing.

  Later, while I was having my hair blown out, the stylist put the hair dryer down, got serious, and said, “You don’t have to tell me, but I want to let you know you’re in a safe space if you choose to. You have a very large chunk of hair cut from the back of your head. Is your partner abusing you? Cutting your hair to demonst
rate his power?”

  I thanked her for her concern and explained it was a self-inflicted hack job, executed all in a day’s work.

  Writing books is enlightening, and I’m always learning something new. Twenty or more books into this second career, after discussing sex tapes and drug sprees (my clients’, not my own), I had to write something for a scientist who studies sex as medicine. The first time I met with her at her corporate-looking office, I was clearing some space for my computer and moving a few things around on a desk, including some gadgets with wires coming out of them and clips attached. I mindlessly shuffled stuff around and then I froze.

  “Um, what are those things I just moved?” I asked.

  “Anal and vaginal probes,” she said casually.

  “Clean, I hope?” I asked as nonchalantly as I could.

  “Sterilized.”

  I’d never worked with a matter-of-fact scientist before. It was already shaping up to be one of my stranger, though more fascinating, book experiences.

  As we worked that day, we spent a lot of time going back and forth on how to practically apply some of her notions. It was challenging. Most protocols, for lack of a better explanation, could be handled on one’s own, shall we say. But there was one specific concept that required genital stroking by a partner in order to work properly.

  Having written many proposals previously, I knew this question would be raised by potential publishers.

  Up next on things you don’t expect to be debating during work hours when you wake up that morning:

  Me: “So, what about single people? We need an explanation for them in this section. Who will stroke their genitals?”

  Doc: “It doesn’t have to be a romantic partner; they can get a friend to do it.”

  Me: “Um. I honestly don’t think that’s a good option. There’s got to be a solo way to handle this.”

  Doc: “There isn’t. They can just call a friend to come over and follow the protocol.”

  Me: “There’s literally nobody I would ever call to come to my home in a pinch to stroke my genitals.”

  Doc: “I could actually think of at least two people who would help me with this.”

  Me: “I can actually think of a dozen single friends living in NYC who, like me, would not phone a friend to work over their private parts as a favor.”

  The doctor did eventually explain an excellent and viable solution we could write about and made the point that there were legitimate organizations that would help address the issue of not having a stroker, as well as a way of making single people not feel weird.

  When I take on a client with a self-help, health, or wellness premise, I practice the author’s diet plan or their personal improvement regimen. I really live it, so I can assess it. If it’s a workout or journal ritual as they would prescribe it, then my experience with it helps me explain the hiccups experienced along the way. (NB: I did not take this approach with the aforementioned sex book, meaning no probes were inserted in my person for the making of that proposal.) Instead, I asked single people I knew who they would call to stroke their genitals. Nobody. Even a coupled-up friend was clear: “I don’t think I’d even ask my boyfriend to stroke my genitals for science.”

  The sex book was the anomaly. The rest, I lived. Simply put: The more books I wrote, the more books I fully experienced. I lived them all. Deeply. Occupational hazard: The more books I wrote about fixes, the more and more holes in myself I found that needed plugging.

  As I started a new career, I began growing increasingly susceptible to the fix-me brigade. Life in general, plus all the entirely different set of anxieties that come from working for oneself, made me vulnerable. My self-employed friends and I refer to those stresses as “freelancer’s syndrome”—a constant state of heightened anxiety, based on the misplaced certainty that nobody will ever contract you again and that you will starve to death while living in a box on a street corner.

  Still, betting on myself gave me more power to avoid living in that box. People who got laid off in 2008 got laid off again and again in the wake of that economy.

  Later, as I was writing this book, I asked one of the authors I worked with—also one of my favorite humans—Dr. Ramani Durvasula, why we flock to the fixes and the books. She said there are multiple reasons. We don’t like uncertainty, so we call upon psychics to give us some answers. And when we go through struggles, we want to know we’re not alone. If there’s a self-help book out there offering to fix an ailment, that means perhaps 100,000 other people are feeling what you’re feeling. Therefore, those books got popular because they provided a collective belonging we all crave.

  That resonated with me. I was never a fan of the unknown, and it was true, as I wrote and as I read, it was nice to know that what bothered or challenged me challenged a lot of other people too. And that it was all okay to discuss, or even ponder.

  It was suddenly my job to live self-help. Upgrades, classes, coaches, books—tax-deductible research! A new mission emerged in my life—learn it all and then fix it all. Halfway, or moderate, is not a speed on my gearshift. I was getting paid and I was basically getting boatloads of free advice.

  But my need for a stronger self-help high eventually ballooned beyond the one-dimensional pictures of a vision board or the words of my clients. So began an insatiable craving for multiple fixes, such as juice-fast retreats, coaches of all kinds, full weeks spent Marie Kondoing my house, journaling protocols, psychics, workshops, and a range of books. The world was force-feeding me spiritual seminars, specialists, and life-altering reads, and I grabbed at them all, hoping for, well, some monumental change that would make me better in every way humanly possible. It was coming at me hard. And all the fixes offered up were incredibly radical, too. No small steps; instead, massive overhauls were promised with a few weeks of effort. They wouldn’t be pushing these major remedies if I didn’t need them or if they didn’t work, right? That’s what I told myself.

  Voilà—a career based on self-help was born.

  And so was my new habit.

  Chapter 4

  Fat Women Don’t Get Frenched

  dating

  By the time I reached my forties, it became painfully clear that dating had become like shopping at Marshalls or TJ Maxx. Everything was picked over. The inventory was low and discounted for a reason. All that was left on the shelves were the seconds—damaged, flawed, and ill-fitting. The stuff on the racks was there mostly because nobody else wanted it. At first glance, it was hard to tell what, exactly, was wrong with the goods, but there was always something. (And I’d find it eventually.) Still, I’d try it on anyway, hopeful. Sometimes I would even buy something just to buy something. It wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, but it was there, so I grabbed it while I could.

  Like discount shopping, dating in my forties meant grabbing the most passable thing I could find because one can’t leave empty-handed, but by the time I got home, exhausted from scouring the discount racks for something I didn’t even really love, pretending it would work, I was always left with nothing but regrets. Sure, I’d use it once or twice, hoping it would eventually fit, or look better than I expected. But each time, I learned it was never going to change. Frequently, it just came up short and I eventually discarded or donated it, disappointed yet again.

  When I was in my twenties, trying to find a partner felt easier, not that I landed one. Dating in your twenties is more like going through the racks at Bergdorf or Saks. The available inventory is generally high-quality, and there’s so much more of it—lots of styles, sizes, and colors. You can take your time and look through the racks, try on ridiculous things for fun or things that you know will be great, and consider some wackier ones that you’re not sure about. You can splurge and buy something crazy without worrying about the long-term ramifications of having spent your money on a feather-trimmed go-go bolero jacket and having none left for practical black w
ork pants that will last you a decade.

  When you are young, you might even be brave enough to buy something you can’t quite afford, but that dazzles you, then wear it once and return it with the tags still intact. And if you’re broke, you can still window-shop and never actually commit to a single item. There’s joy in that.

  I dated like that when I was young, but what I didn’t realize was that I wouldn’t always have the luxury of making foolish or frivolous purchases. Time runs out on that eventually.

  When you’re in your thirties, you are more likely searching (somewhat frantically) for the father of your child, and maybe feeling somewhat desperate about it. The pressure is really on. The clock is ticking. The inventory is shrinking. Judgment is clouded.

  For me, dating in my thirties looked like that episode of Laverne & Shirley when they won a shopping spree at a grocery store. They were on the clock, and whatever groceries they could get across the line before time ran out, they got to keep. (As a kid I watched this episode with my dad, and he told me if I ever won a shopping spree just to grab all the steak because it’s the most expensive item in the store. #LifeLesson #HoldingOutHopeToWinAShoppingSpree.)

  Laverne and Shirley overloaded their cart, stuffed items down their pants, and ultimately couldn’t carry everything they had hopelessly grabbed, let alone walk to the finish line, so by the time they dragged themselves to the end, the only items they got to keep were fish sticks and scooter pies. Junk. Limited value added.

  They wanted too much, shot too high. They had big expectations and, in the end, got next to nothing.

  Restocking the Dating Shelf

  A couple of years into my new career as a ghostwriter, I started to get my professional stride. In the career category, early signs indicated that the Universe had been onto something.

  There was a steady-ish stream of work coming in, and while I never exactly became a calm and relaxed person in terms of worrying about paying the bills, I had enough work coming in to keep me going. That meant I spent 100 percent of my time focusing on building that business. Losing a job, freaking out about it non-stop, and making radical career choices based on the Universe allowed for little else. That was all the capacity I had at the time.